You say "flawed algorithm," I saw "easily exploitable by intelligent students."
Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
111–120 of 302 posts
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#112Unlike a multiple choice test where the primary audience is automated graders, the primary audience for an essay is other humans. If even Google and Facebook with their billions of dollars and billions of posts worth of data, still cannot always understand the intent and purpose of written content, what hope do these algorithms have? If it is cost-prohibitive for every essay to be graded by humans, then they should b…
> Otherwise, we are missing the whole point of essays which is to communicate effectively with another human, not just match certain text patterns.
I agree, this is traditionally the purpose of an essay. But to play devil's advocate, consider the rising number of people who are writing SEO or ASO content which is actually targeted at machines.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or...report it to the police? I’d gladly risk my job to do the right thing in that instance.
What my mom saw had an ID number on it. No other demographics. And she was grading from multiple states. So do what? Contact her local police? With a written accusation from a child? Is that enough to get a warrant to force the company to release the demographic information? And people don't work at a job like that because they want to. They work there because they need the money. Everything she took in and out of th…
If she did Xerox the disclosures, walked out, and said "please call the cops" when challenged, at least it would be a matter of public record
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#114My mother worked grading standardized tests. It was a hellish job for many reasons (limited breaks, etc.) One question she had to grade was essentially, "What's something you want your teacher to know about you?" It was an essay answer, and she was supposed to grade it on grammar, etc. Just the mechanical aspects of writing. (The real question explained the details more, but that was the core of the question.) She sa…
The US has federal child abuse mandatory reporting requirement laws which include teachers and school staff and personnel, as well as additional state requirements which vary but include, for 11 states, faculty, staff, and volunteers at public or private higher education institutions. Computer and IT professionals are also covered in cases. Faculty, administrators, athletics staff, or other employees and volunteers a…
so ... nobody wonders about the obvious rammification: then any ML scoring systems ... must detect child abuse signals!
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#115I think machine learned grading of papers is insane, but at the same time I don't think we should be training or encouraging students to speak in AAVE (as the article suggests).
I think the right approach for machine learned systems is to automatically "whitelist" essays rather than "blacklisting" them. Students in the middle of the distribution of essays aren't really interesting, so whitelist them, give them a pass. Those at the extremes can be either exceptional or terrible, but usually terrible. The judgement of those at the extremes should be decided by a human, not a machine. You wouldn't want to blacklist the Einstein of essays because he did something genius that is indistinguishable from insanity.
However, I think there are some essays that can automatically be blacklisted. For example, those with:
1. Plagiarism (perhaps human moderated)
2. Extremely low word count
3. Extremely high count of fake words
And at the end of the day, these essay assignments aren't there to judge whether a student is the next writing sensation; they are given to judge whether the student can write legible sentences and words, to ensure they are prepared for the future. So perhaps it is at least possible to automatically blacklist on sentence structure and spelling (you should just lose points for invalid structure or invalid words, you shouldn't gain points for big words or complicated sentences). To make this fair, the student should be informed of this requirement. If they are informed and still fail, then they need to be remediated. If we discover that a disproportionate number of minorities are getting blacklisted, then we should investigate why the school is failing to teach them proper sentence structure and spelling, not pretend we can change the world to make AAVE an acceptable dialect of english in the workplace.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in AI, and was very surprised when I heard about this (a few years ago). I don't think anyone who works in the area thinks the tech is ready for this kind of deployment. There is research on the subject [1], and NLP systems can do better than baseline methods, but the error rates are still pretty high. A thing you quickly find if you try to download off-the-shelf NLP tools and apply them to anything is how lit…
You've noticed though that the AI con is on. This damages your work as people get burned and will bring about the second "AI winter" People making big decisions with a lot of money around computing know nothing about it and are marks for con-artists. Think big consulting firms selling to senior public servants in washington. "For a successful technology reality must take precedence of public relations." But reality j…
Second? We’re heading to #3 — fully cyclical
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#117This is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.
I totally agree that "AI" grading is totally bullshit. But, I also have plenty of experience teaching/TAing large courses, and after reading too many essays they all become semanticically saturated meaninglessness. One can not help but skim them, and grade according to a few quick heuristics. At that point one tries to be self-consistent and defensible in one's grading, but careful consideration is right out. I suspect state graders are dealing with way more than 100 essays per person and are probably on a tight schedule too. It's quite possible that a ML model is better than an exhausted human grader, as their cognitive strategies are mostly identical.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#118This is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.
In a forum of CS people I'm surprised this is one of the top opinions. Our field is full of super surprising results like this -- that you don't have to actually understand the text at beyond basic grammar structures to reasonably accurately predict the score a human would give it. Like this kind of thing should be cool , not insane. I mean wasn't it cool in your AI class when you learned that DFS could play Mario if…
Teaching human-human communication by removing human inputs and having computers decide about quality... call me a skeptic. I feel bad for the students. Essay grading was bad enough before this
Narrowly for grammar however - is even that a good thing? It probably helps scale grammar help to more students, but if those tools became ubiquitous in grading and editing then unique voices would just disappear and a lot of potentially “great writers” might choose different careers because the machines don’t like them
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#119This is my first time learning that AI-graded essays are a thing. Am I the only one who thinks that's insane? I feel like you'd probably have to have an AGI to meaningfully evaluate an essay.
In a forum of CS people I'm surprised this is one of the top opinions. Our field is full of super surprising results like this -- that you don't have to actually understand the text at beyond basic grammar structures to reasonably accurately predict the score a human would give it. Like this kind of thing should be cool , not insane. I mean wasn't it cool in your AI class when you learned that DFS could play Mario if…
This problem is a first class demonstration of the difference between "can we?" and "should we?"
The fact that it's being implemented in society is insane because anyone who is paying attention to the state of AI today already knows how it will go wrong: without reading the article I already guessed that it systematically discriminated against certain demographics. Which was in fact what the article claimed.
It's interesting that it's possible to predict what the scorer would decide, but the moment you actually implement it is when all of the known problems become relevant, and the intellectual wonder must take a backseat to the human problems.
Re: Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
#120Quality of educational is proportional to quality of evaluation.
Evaluation of how well someone follows arbitrary language conventions is worse than useless.
I only got to university English 101 outside of some technical writing in the engineering department, but I have to say none of my education in writing was worth anything past elementary school. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things to teach and evaluate, to be fair, but I feel like I am missing a huge chunk of my education and general ability because of it. I can't write or form an argument particularly well, rambling on HN and the like is the closest thing to education I have had.
Prescriptive language rules are not entirely useless. That is the best you can say about them.